Poems and Essays of Herbert Krause ed. by Arthur R. Huseboe (review)

Reviews 137 stitute the literature and literary history of the United States. . . . Those com­ mitted to a redefinition emphasize the idea that American literature is not main­ stream, that what everyone needs to know about it may be quite beyond the creation of a canon.”Accordingly, Robert Hemenway applauds the manner in which “advocates of cultural and gender studies are keeping the heat on”English departments, and argues that “black literature can release the literary classroom from its aura of privilege—no small benefit for a student population that from now to the end of the century will be increasingly from the working class and increasingly black.” In Mr. Hemenway’s view, “too often the traditional class­ room and the traditional canon become a bludgeon in the cause ofhigh culture.” For Houston A. Baker, Jr., Michel Foucault provides the method for an “archaeology of knowledge”whose “goal ... is to advance the human sciences beyond a traditional humanism.”To Mr. Baker, Karl Marx’s concept of “surplus value”illuminates the economic realities of plantation production economy in such works as The Life of Olaudah Equiano and Narrative of the Life ofFrederick Douglass. Harold H. Kolb,Jr., analyzing additions to standard American litera­ ture anthologies in recent decades, observes that “new American authors are at the perimeter of our traditional ideas, making raids on the standard canon, forcing us to debate our history, define our values, reconsider our notions of literature. They oblige us continually to relearn the American lesson that minority cultures enrich and transform the dominant culture by bringing to it the freshness of differing perspectives as well as a deeper understanding of our common humanity.” Many of these perspectives will be familiar—and some of them, like claims for the validity if not supremacy of oral literatures, almost repetitiously famil­ iar—to any specialist in American literature. But essays such as Amy Ling’s, Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s, and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs appreciably extend information available on these topics. The most notable contributions in Redefining American Literary History are six generous bibliographies that conclude the volume, particularly those de­ voted to American Indian Literature, Asian American Literature, and Chicano Literature. Although hardly exhaustive, these lists of primary and secondary sources can be highly valuable for those entering upon a study of any of the ethnic experiences that loom larger and larger in an expanding concept of western American literature. ALAN GRIBBEN Auburn University at Montgomery Poems and Essays ofHerbert Krause. Edited by Arthur R. Huseboe. (Sioux Falls: Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, 1990. 396 pages, $14.95.) Herbert Krause (1905-1976) was a master teacher, poet, novelist, ornitholo­ gist, historian, and founder of the Center for Western Studies at Augustana 138 WesternAmerican Literature College (South Dakota). His teaching left an indelible mark on several genera­ tions of writers and students from the northern Great Plains, and several of his books—most notably Wind Without Rain (1939) and The Thresher (1946)—have become minor classics of western American fiction. Arthur R. Huseboe’s anthology of Krause’s lesser-known writing contains 117 poems and thirty essays, many of them previously unpublished, as well as nine photographs of Krause at various stages of his life. The poems draw their subject matter mainly from the rural life of the Pockerbrush country of north­ west Minnesota in which Krause was born and reared and from which his heart never really escaped. In poems such as “Hillside Burial,” “Burned Out,” and “Old Kethmann,”one senses the influence of Robert Frost, whom Krause came to know and revere at Bread Loaf in the summer of 1935. The essays,written between 1939 and 1973, are pleasingly diverse. Whether writing on literature, the craft offiction, western American history, ornithology, or ecology, Krause sought to set an example for young western writers and to encourage them “to speak for the courageous men and women who struck plow into sod and axe into tree, flung back obdurate nature, storm and locust-plague, to raise side-wall and roof-tree for themselves, their sons and daughters and their children; with the lantern offaith in their eyes and the strength ofgiants in their hands.” This Turnerian view of...